"I'm not putting this on you," she said quickly. "I want to be really clear. It's on my list because it's one of my reasons, and I'm writing down all my reasons, and it's the truest one, and it's the one I'm most ashamed of. Not because of you. Because of me."
When she came home from the place by the pond, Dr. Mehrotra had sat with the two of them and helped them make a different kind of plan, a plan for the grown-ups, which was not laminated and was not on the refrigerator. One of the things on it was a question. Emery was supposed to ask it every night before they went to sleep. Not how are you, not are you okay, which were questions an alcoholic could answer in her sleep, but a specific one, a dull one, that you couldn't wriggle out of without lying outright: How was your count today? And Noelle was supposed to answer it honestly, whatever the answer was, and he was supposed to listen to the answer without fixing or flinching. And for a year he had asked it every night, propped on his elbow in the dark. And she had answered. Good. Hard. Hard, I wanted it at the Weis when I saw the wine aisle. Good, I talked to Rosario. Easy, actually. I forgot about it till right now.
He did not remember when he stopped. That was the truth, and it came up in him with the same cold as the dots had. He had stopped the way you stop flossing, a night here, a night there, a few nights in a row because she seemed so obviously fine, until the question felt strange in his mouth, until asking it felt less like care than like suspicion, like he was searching her purse. Sometime in the second year he had stopped and she had never said a word about it, and he had told himself her not saying anything meant it didn't matter.
"I felt like I was accusing you," he said. "Every night. Like I didn't trust you."
"I know. I know that's why." She took the paper back and folded it. "And I could have asked you to keep asking. I could have said, Em, I need the question. And I didn't, because when you stopped asking, there was a part of me that felt this—this little door open. This little room where nobody was checking. I didn't go into it. Not for a long time. But I knew it was there. And I liked knowing." She put her hand flat on the folded paper. "That's what I mean. It's not on you. You stopped asking and I let you. That's on me."
"It's on both of us," he said.
She looked at him then, really looked, for the first time since he'd come home, and he saw her want to argue and decide not to.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Some of it."
"Some of it," he agreed. And then, because it had to be said and because if he did not say it now he was afraid that it would somehow get lost in all the rest of this, softened, explained, woven into the story of her disease until it became just another symptom: "But not the slap, Noelle."
"No."
"The drinking—I can hold that. I've held it before. I know what it is. I know you didn't choose to be the kind of person it does this to. And the lying, and the number, and the keys, and the car." He breathed. "I can be angry about all that and still hold it. But you hit our daughter. You hit her in the face, hard enough to leave your fingers on her, because she was doing exactly what we taught her to do. Exactly what you promised her, in writing, on that door, she'd never be in trouble for. That's not the disease. I'm not going to let that be the disease. That's a separate thing. That's its own thing."